Events

15-16 October 2007
Renaissance Hotel, Toronto

Click here to see full conference program.

This conference was directly followed by a second conference:

Putting Theory to Practice: Adaptive Clinical Trial Design

16-17 October 2007
Renaissance Hotel, Toronto

Click here to see full conference program.

Co-sponsored by Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI), GenTel BioSciences, MaRS Discovery District, Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, Tessella, Toronto Region Research Alliance

OGI's President and CEO, Dr. Christian Burks, addresses the conference.

More than 150 industry and academic participants attended these back-to-back meetings, which described progress in applying the rich endowment of potential biomarkers coming out of genomics and proteomics research to personalized medicine - understanding which patients are predisposed to disease or   to respond to particular treatments.

The two meetings drew participants from Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition, there were representatives from more than ten major pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Schering Plough, and Wyeth.

Dr. Alastair Glass, Ontario's Deputy Minister of Research and Innovation, welcomed the guests and spoke of the role of the life sciences in Ontario's innovation agenda. Other speakers from Ontario included Drs. Kenneth Evans (Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network), Geoffrey Liu (Ontario Cancer Institute), Frances O'Malley (Mount Sinai Hospital), Robert Phillips (Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, or OICR), Kathleen Pritchard (Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Centre), and Ming Sound Tsao (University Health Network).

In addition, there were case-study presentations from researchers at GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Wyeth  and a keynote presentation from Dr. Samir Hanash, Director, Molecular Diagnostics Program, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre (Seattle, Washington), who discussed strategies and challenges in proteomic profiling of serum for cancer diagnostics.

A highlight was the luncheon presentation by Dr. Brent Zanke (OICR), who focused on translating genotypes into biomarkers for colorectal cancer as well as for age-related macular degeneration.  Dr. Zanke founded Toronto-based ArcticDx, which draws on discoveries by the OGI-funded ARCTIC research project.